Monday, July 25, 2005

Classic 12"s Week - What Time Is Love?

The latest Q magazine is their "scandalous rock'n'roll behaviour" issue - filled with stories about all manner of rock star stupidity and bad behaviour. One of my personal faves is the one about how Bill Drummond and Jimi Cauty, AKA The KLF, burned a millions pounds in a hut on a tiny island in the North Atlantic. It was one of the ultimate "art terrorist" acts, and probably one they regret every day of their lives! Reading it made me think back to the glory days of their career - Chill Out and The White Room, and how unlikely a pop duo they were and how odd it was that they conquered the pop charts of the world with their techno anthems. It also made me head straight for the record rack and this 12" - one of the highlights of their recording career, 1990's What Time Is Love? (Live At Transcentral). They took all kinds of vocal samples (the MC5 intro, Jim Morrison's thank you's) and mashed them up with huge pounding techno beats, disco diva chants of "MU MU!", the rap by MC Bello, and then they let the Moody Boys wreak sonic havoc all over it. It was a pretty unique thing - an acid-house techno hip-pop smash. It sounded like nothing else - hell, it still sounds like nothing else. It's a classic twelve inch mix. That's this week's theme so the next couple of days worth of posts are all going to be "classic 12"s" - mostly from the "baggy/rave" era of the late '80s and early '90s.

ah, those were the days...hours and hours with nothing better to do than spend a whole day trying to reconstruct the 1987 JAMMs album with that weird 12" they released + some old Sex Pistols records and my mum's Abba...

Managed it though...in a fashion. Can't remember now the record we needed to complete the samples...